Navigating the Primary Challenges Faced by Small Businesses in 2023

If you’ve been working from home, you might feel like all of the days are running together, and you don’t have a good handle on time anymore.

Here’s a question for you: When’s the last time you took time off work?Taking a break to unplug and recharge can give us the strength and resilience we need to manage all that we have.Taking time off to focus on something more creative or physical, for example, can give you a sense of work-life balance.It’s not enough to just take time off, you want to make sure your time off is truly refreshing.

Try these tips to help you get as much as you can out of your vacation—even if you’re not going anywhere.- Make sure you take the amount of time you need.

If you don’t feel like you fully wind down from your job on the weekends, then taking two or three days off might not be long enough to rejuvenate you.- Before your vacation, look at the work that’ll need to be done while you’re gone.

Can any of it be done ahead of time?

If so, do it—but slowly so as not to overwhelm yourself.- Set an out-of-office message for your email so people know they shouldn’t expect to hear from you.

You want to be where your target demographic lives, you want to make your store front or headquarters accessible, and you want to make sure you have adequate space to showcase your products or services and do your job.

Look no further than Austin for the hub of small businesses, economic growth, and capital.

The answer is a bit too complex to break down in one sentence.Keep reading in order to learn everything you need to know about Austin, small business, and why success is so common in this city.Location, Location, Location One of the reasons Austin is such a great palace to start a small business is because of its location.

With greater surface area comes greater selection of entrepreneurs, young talent, graduates, and a larger talent pool than other states have access to.

From tax benefits and help with innovation and tech companies, it’s easier to start a company here than many other places.

Luckily, Austin puts preventative measures and protection in place for those who work in Austin to help them receive adequate earnings for their labor and protect them from unfair treatment and more.

AI  for small businesses is paving the way for sustainable growth.

In this edition, we, at Oodles, as an experiential AI development company, map why and how small businesses banking on AI can emerge as the winning players in the new normal.

As a well-established chatbot development company, Oodles AI has built dynamic conversational AI interfaces for diverse businesses.

Learn more: AI for Small Businesses

It wasn’t until the pandemic that it went from optional to a necessity, and it’s sped up digital transformations in a drastic way.Rapidly employers had to consider evolution as far as their IT infrastructure, how employees could access the resources they needed to do their jobs, even when working from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and how to create policies conducive to this new way of doing business.Employers and IT teams have lost much of their centralized visibility to see what’s happening on their network.

Employees are laxer about cybersecurity when they’re working from home.There’s also often a lack of clarity on remote work because there aren’t well-defined policies in place.With all of this in mind, the following is a guide to what businesses should know about transitioning to a more permanent version of remote work, or at least a hybrid environment.An Overview of Remote WorkNow that we’re significantly into the pandemic, both limitations and benefits of employees working remotely has become much clearer.

That could mean, if practice followed the estimation, that three to four times as many people would be working from home than they were before the pandemic.As was touched on above, there are challenges, including not just the technical considerations but also how to coach employees, ensure there’s recognition and maintain a cultural connection to the company.Specific business considerations stemming from remote work include:Fraud—there’s the potential for fraud to become a more significant risk when employees work from home.

You want to make sure that leadership is regularly communicating with them, sharing goals, and reinforcing your corporate vision.

Employees may not know how to work securely when they’re remote, or they may be less vigilant when they’re not in the office environment.

It’s also hard for employees to discern what’s a phishing scam because they’re highly sophisticated in many cases.Passwords: Even when you’re utilizing VPNs, firewalls, and more traditional means of securing your network, if employees have weak passwords or reuse them, you’re at risk.